【经济学人】数字运算 | 2017.05.11 | 总第910期

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. By Geoffrey West. Penguin Press; 479 pages; $30. Weidenfeld & Nicholson; £25.

《尺度：隐藏在生物体，城市，经济和企业背后，成长革新，生存维持及其生活步调的普遍规律》。作者杰弗里·韦斯特。企鹅出版社；共479页；售价30美元。韦登菲尔德及尼科尔森出版社，售价25英镑。

GEOFFREY WEST is the restless sort. He has spent much of his career as a theoretical physicist, working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. After a while he became fascinated by biology, then cities and companies. He is interested in all sorts of things, from Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s ship designs to Ingmar Bergman’s films. When he says that he drives his wife nuts, you believe him.

杰弗里·韦斯特是一个精神百倍的人。作为理论物理学家，他职业生涯中的大部分时间都是在新墨西哥州洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室度过。之后杰弗里迷上了生物，然后是各种各样的城市和企业。他的兴趣很广泛，从布鲁内尔的船舶设计到英格玛·伯格曼的电影。当他说自己让妻子气得发狂时，你要相信他的话。

• drives sb nuts：把某人逼疯，让某人气得发狂

• Isambard Kingdom Brunel：法裔工程师布鲁内尔

• Ingmar Bergman：瑞典导演

On one level, “Scale” is a book about Mr West’s peculiar career path. But on another, it is about the hidden mathematical patterns underlying life, cities and commerce. Many things that appear unrelated are actually linked, he says. The size of an animal is related to the speed of its metabolism and its lifespan. If you know the population of a city and what country it is in, you can predict fairly accurately how many petrol stations it has and how many patents its citizens produce. Mr West even suggests that the mice and the metropolises are linked.

在某个层面上，《尺度》是一本关于韦斯特先生从事过的奇特职业的书。但是在另一种层面上，它涉及到隐藏在生物体，城市以及商业活动背后的数学模式。他说许多东西看似不相关，实则有千丝万缕的联系。动物的体型与其新陈代谢的速度以及寿命长短有关。获悉一座城市的人口数量及其所属国家，则能相当准确地预测出这座城市有多少加油站，以及市民们贡献了多少专利。韦斯特先生甚至认为小老鼠和大都市也相互联系。

• Metabolism：新陈代谢

To take an odd example: how much LSD should you give to an elephant, should you feel minded to do such an irresponsible thing? The answer is not the 297 milligrams that was injected into a poor pachyderm called Tusko in 1962, leading shortly to his death. The researchers came up with that amount by extrapolating from research on cats. They had simply scaled up a feline acid dose to account for the greater mass, without accounting for the fact that safe dosages for drugs do not quite double with a doubling in mass, and other factors also play a role. Extrapolate this over the many multiples of mass an elephant has over a cat, and Tusko should have had a few milligrams, not several hundred.

举个奇怪的例子：你觉得给一头大象注射多少迷幻药合适？你是否会有意做这种不负责任的事情？1962年，一头可怜的名为Tusko的大象因为注射了297毫克迷幻剂而猝死。297毫克可不是正确答案。研究人员通过对猫做研究推算出这一用量。他们仅根据在猫身上的实验而推算出大致剂量而不考虑药物的安全用量不随质量的加倍而加倍，除此之外还有其它因素起作用。根据这一点即可推算体重是猫许多倍的大象能承受的正常迷幻药用量，Tusko本该注射几毫克，而不是几百毫克。

• Pachyderm：大的厚皮动物，比如象和犀牛

• Extrapolating：推断

• Feline：猫科的

• Acid：麦角酰二乙胺也被称作acid

Non-linear scaling relationships such as these fascinate Mr West. “Underlying the daunting complexity of the natural world lies a surprising simplicity, regularity and unity when viewed through the coarse-grained lens of scale,” he writes. In other words: do not get too distracted by what animals and plants look like, or how they have evolved. Just look at fundamental properties like their size and weight. These tend to obey mathematical laws.

诸如此类的非线性尺度关系令韦斯特先生着迷。他写道：“如果从一个粗糙的视角来看，自然世界那无穷的复杂性下面其实藏着惊人的简单性、规律性和统一性。”换言之，不要被动植物的外观或者进化方式蒙蔽。仅仅关注它们的尺寸和重量等基本属性。这才是符合数学法则的东西。

Cities, he suggests, are a little like giant organisms. They often grow in the same exponential way. A map of lorry journeys looks a bit like a network of blood vessels. Cities also scale non-linearly. A city that is twice as populous as another does not have twice as much infrastructure and twice as much productivity. It has a bit less infrastructure than you would expect, and a bit more productivity per head (as well as more crime). Just as an elephant is a more efficient animal than a cat, big cities are more efficient than small ones. That is why people are drawn to them.

他认为城市有点像庞大的生命体。它们通常以相同的指数方式发展。卡车的路线图看起来有点像血管网络。其实城市也符合非线性缩放，一座城市即使人口多出两倍，基础设施和生产率也不会增加两倍。基础设施数量比你估计的要少，而人均生产率（犯罪率也是）可能要多些。正如大象比猫更能干，大城市的效率比小城市更高。这就是人们向往大城市的原因。

Having charted these patterns, Mr West is not quite sure what to make of them. He suggests that urban planners should think of themselves as facilitators of fundamental natural processes. But how, exactly, should they do that? Like many urbanists, Mr West admires Jane Jacobs, who believed that cities such as her beloved New York should be left to evolve naturally rather than being tweaked by meddlesome planners. In fact New York is one of the world’s most rigorously planned cities. Its grid pattern was laid down when the city was just a small settlement on Manhattan’s southern tip.

虽然描绘出这些模式，但韦斯特先生不太确定该如何做。他认为城市规划者应当将自己看作基本自然过程的推动者。但是他们究竟该如何做呢？像许多城市学家一样，韦斯特先生崇拜简·雅各布斯。雅各布斯认为，像她所喜爱的纽约这样的城市一样应该自然而然地演变，而无需好事的规划人员去调整。实际上纽约是世界上规划最为严谨的城市之一。当这座城市还是曼哈顿南缘的一个小定居点时，它的网格布局就已经定下了。

• Tweak：稍稍调整

• Meddlesome：爱管闲事的

Mr West is an entertaining, chatty guide to the things that interest him. That is mostly to the good, although the chattiness does mean that “Scale” suffers from a problem of scale. A ruthless editor could have excised at least a quarter of the words and created a tighter, more compelling book. Size is not always everything.

韦斯特先生以幽默健谈的方式介绍他感兴趣的东西。期待您的翻译，明天会有针对这句话的长难句解析哟~无情的编辑可以删去至少四分之一的内容，打造一本内容更加紧凑而扣人心弦的书。大小并不能衡量一切。

• Excise：切去，删除

翻译 ▍木三阳，Andrea，小小

审核 ▍小太阳Kiki

图文编辑 ▍澜意

责任编辑 ▍毛毛